Clever stuff: This deck of cards is actually a music album

by MARTIN BRYANT — Jan 26, 2016 in SHAREABLES

http://tnw.to/g4xnO

When I was introduced to musician Beatie Wolfe at the DLD conference in Munich last week, she was wearing a gold jacket with a pink and white design stitched into it, which she explained was an ‘encoding’ of one of her songs.

Wolfe, then, isn’t your everyday singer-songwriter. She looks for ways to give her music the physical experience that has been lost since we shifted from CDs and vinyl to digital consumption.

Credit: Martin Bryant / The Next Web

Aside from the jacket, she released her first album as a 3D interactive app and her follow-up is available in the form of a deck of cards. Tap each card against a suitably NFC-enabled phone and you’ll be taken to a Web page where you can listen to the song and find out more about it.

That might sound like a lot of work compared with clicking ‘play’ and listening to the whole album in an app, but music used to be a lot more about ceremony – placing a needle in a groove, taking it off at the end of side one, flipping the disc and repeating. Far from a chore, it was about devoting time and attention to the music.

It’s a brilliant, inspiring idea that transcends novelty. If your favorite artist did this, it would be a collectors item – something to treasure and connect you with the music in a way that searching for it on Spotify simply can’t.